


Gunshot. Windpipe. Hit and Run.

by carlizzlerose



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2014-11-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 20:46:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1831723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carlizzlerose/pseuds/carlizzlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>David Strider works for a magazine. He takes pictures of the world in all it's expanse and nuance, and when he's lucky, they make it on the glossy pages he labors over in InDesign day in and day out. </p><p>But there's another stack of pictures, pictures of a friend who's died and died again, hidden under clothes and behind shoes and forgotten bits of childhood, dusting slowly with the years.</p><p>You see, we all have skeletons in the closet. But every now and again, they  find a way out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Preface

**Author's Note:**

> Another fic based on an AU I read on tumblr. This one was the reincarnation AU, and if you haven't heard about it, I hope the work speaks for itself.

Gunshot. Windpipe. Hit and run.

Gunshots leave open, gushing wounds. They splinter as as soon as they hit the skin and you have to get every piece out before the would can be sown up tight and start to heal. The first time I dug shrapnel out of a bleeding hole in your chest I stopped wondering why so many people die from bullet wounds.

Gunshot. Windpipe. Hit and run.

Windpipes are far too small, but even so, lips should never get that blue, not when the only help around was that scared kid with no idea what he was supposed to have done when your color started to die.

Gunshot. Windpipe. Hit and run. Hit and run.

I was the only number in your phone, but it still took weeks for them to call me.

They didn't know who you were.

I could have told them.


	2. Snow Peaks and Deep Ravines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (December 2013)
> 
> This chapter includes everyone's favorite iPhone app, some good old Los Angeles geography, and a multitude of awkward phone conversations. 
> 
> I owe this one to Curl Up and Die by Relient K and Saved by The Dear Hunter.

I try to rub the sleep from my eyes but it doesn't matter. It's not going anywhere. They sting a little; light is whitest early morning, especially with a breeze and the faint smell of firewood in the air. It's white and it's winter and I think I'm going to fall asleep at my desk.

The secretary sets coffee down in front of me and smiles, turning around just as I'm looking up so I get a full blown glimpse of her ass and that's fine, but when it happens every day, the whole 'hot secretary' thing wears off. I've worked for this magazine for weeks and on the first day, it was something to admire, but now it's just kind of round and there and I'm really not interested in hitting that. I wonder if she'd stop if she knew I have no idea what her name is. Hot needy secretary. 

I don't know if it's the sleep deprivation or just my default state but it's early in the morning, and I'm already feeling like a finely tuned jackass. 

I brave the way those red lips outline "Good morning, Mr. Strider," and let her carry on with sorting papers or answering phones or seducing other Bay & Design employees with that unforgiving pencil skirt and apparent endless supply of really shitty coffee. 

I think I was trying to work before she came over here. Right, eye rubbing, white Christmas. My eyes are stinging and with stinging comes blurring and my computer screen just looks a mess to me; I can't tell where one pixel of my InDesign layout ends and the other begins. The prints on my desk are all just masses of gradient and halftone color and it's then that I drag myself out of my chair and say I'm taking, verbatim, "A smoke break or whatever the fuck."

I don't smoke. You smoked. I loosen my tie and undo the first button of my shirt. Stupid fucking money suit. Too expensive to be such a pain in the ass. Not that I've ironed the dress shirt any day recently, no that would be too goddamn responsible. It's a mass of wrinkles holding up a tired man who's trying to keep his shit together but it's not really working, so instead it all just collapses and I button it up and choke it with a tie and go to work and take smoke breaks. 

 I sit outside on the ledge and play 2048 and pretend, for a minute, that I didn't just turn twenty-seven.

It's a good magazine. I actually read it before I applied here, and that's more devotion than I can say I've ever had at a workplace before. I do good work here too, mostly just layouts but sometimes I get them to put one of my photos in, and that feels pretty good. There's a really small stack of first editions of those magazines on the coffee table at home and I have the pages all flagged, so when I feel down I can just flip and see "Credit: David Strider" and it's really dorky but it's mine.

The first time I got my name in a magazine for a reason like that, you kept it in your briefcase for three months, I think. You didn't keep it nice, but I could tell that you liked to flip to that page too, looking at my name in print and you were probably almost as proud of me as I was of myself. 

And that felt good, too. 

Work is over by 4pm on Tuesdays and today is a Tuesday so I take the bus back to Santa Monica and I'm home by 5. 

By now, the city is warming up and my jacket and tie are in a messy bundle, slung ungracefully over my arm. Everything starts to fall apart around this time. My hair is no longer quaffedand together; strands hang over my sunglasses and obscure the way home for a moment. But it's not that hard to brush the bits away and then I'm fine. I start down Pico and turn on Sawtelle and I'm en route with good time. The sun won't set for a couple hours.

I think this was your favorite time of day, but I never really asked. I just know that you liked that it could feel like the day had gone on forever but you could look at the clock and still have hours ahead of you until the world went to sleep. You never wanted to sleep; I always did. You'd nudge me in the mornings as soon as it hit 8:30 and that would piss me off until 9, because I was tired and we'd stayed up until two the night before. But you sat through my complaining about melatonin and circadian rhythms and eventually I shut up and we had breakfast. 

My favorite time was whenever the sun was out. I was always too white and pasty and burned in the sun, but your skin knew how to warm up and glow. 

The key fits in the lock after the fourth try and a little twisting. 

The apartment is cold and small. It's just a living room and a kitchenette with a bedroom off to the right and bathroom next door. I'm impatient from my troubles with the lock and as soon as I'm in my boxers I fall onto the couch and lie there until midnight at least. 

I don't sleep, I just lie. I'm tired. My head hurts. My chest hurts. My chest always hurts, and lying like this it could be gravity, but I know it isn’t, because when I stand up, it feels the same. If it were gravity, it would maybe feel like I were sinking downwards, but it doesn’t. It’s always in, always the same direction of pressure. If I could sleep, I'd feel much better, I know, but I don't sleep. You would be so proud. 

My eyes are getting heavy just in time for my screen to fill up with her face and a green bar, buzzing loudly against the coffee table. I almost ignore it, but Rose means the best, so unlock itand press the speaker phone, rolling onto my side.

"Rose?"

"Brother, dearest."

"Yeah, hi Rose."

"I'm sorry, were you sleeping? You sound tired."

"Yeah, but it's fine. What's up?”

I hate talking on the phone. I dread it up until the moment I answer, and then it's never as bad as I think it's going to be, but I still sound way too chipper and excited, which is stupid, because I'm not. I'm pissed, obviously, because I'm being forced to talk on the damn phone. She sounds hesitant, and I don't like that either. 

"How are you feeling?"

"Top of the world. You?"

"Swell."

“How's, uh... the guy?"

 "Girl. No longer an item, I'm afraid."

"Oh, sorry."

"And I told you that last week."

"Yeah, you probably did.”

There's quiet for a just a little too long. Rose is my biological sister, my fraternal twin, but sometimes it feels like she's not. I guess I get annoyed with her like you're supposed to get annoyed with a sibling, but she's also patient with me and doesn't pester me more than she knows I mind being pestered and I don't get sick of her like I'm supposed to get sick of a sister. Not really.

 I don’t have a reason to be upset with her, but she could find excuse upon excuse to be mad at me if she wanted too. I wonder if she does want to, or if my inattentive disregard for her life is something she’s gotten used to by now. Maybe three decades of dysfunctional familial tolerance does that to a girl. I wouldn’t really know. 

"How is he."

I cough into the phone, because I have nothing to say, nothing to acknowledge. There's silence then, and it stretches on and I can hear remnants of it in her voice when she forces herself to speak through it's loudness.

"Well, it's only a matter of time.”

I groan and turn my face into the pillow, which muffles the sound halfway out of my mouth. She might be most active at this time of night, but this is the hour at which I am the least receptive to speech. I wonder if she draws from our childhood when she calls me at times like these, remembering when we’d lie in our bunk beds (her on the top bunk, me on the bottom because I rolled around in my sleep) and chatter into the early morning. I always had something to say when I was younger, and if I didn’t have anything cohesive to ramble on about, I pulled something barely sensible out of my ass and ran with it until I hit a point. When I did, I stuck to that like it’d been the intention all alone and nine times out of ten, I got away with it. 

I can almost hear her sad smile on the other end of the line, the look that says “I know you hate it when I worry about you, so I’m not going to say that I’m worrying, but you better understand that I still am.” But we’re three years out from thirty and we’ve played the silent game with our emotions for far too long, I don’t think we could talk about it if we wanted to. 

And I don’t, I really, really don’t.

She’s the one to hang up, and for that, I’m grateful. My phone screen lights up with a lost call and I let it slip from my fingertips and fall to the wooden floor of my half furnished apartment, where it will lie until the morning where I’ll pick it up, curse it’s remaining scarce-charge, and shove it in my pocket on the way to work.

But until then, I’ll dream about peanut butter sandwiches, and funerals I didn’t attend. 

* * *

It’s Christmas morning in Los Angeles, and high noon is barely separable from an early summer morning; the only discontinuity between the two is the light. Temperatures barely surpass 70, and the morning is spent on the phone with family members, phone lines with our voices caressed around the plastic wire stretching from here to Texas, New York, Chicago. The mantra is repeated as one conversation after another falls away.

I know, it’s been a while.

I miss you too.

I’m sorry I’m not there.

 Every year is different from the one that came before, though they all sing a little bit like this. Every year, the words fall scattered in different places across a spectrum of how difficult they are to get out of my mouth. Some years, it’s unbearable, like I can’t get my teeth around the syllables, like I can’t stand the lie myself, like I cringe as the words leave my lips knowing nobody believes I’d be any happier somewhere other than where I am, even myself. And I’ll scold  myself from here until the new year for even saying it. 

 Others, the words will spill so purely and genuinely from my mouth I can hardly bear my own honesty. Saying them reveals something so deeply lost over the past year that I can feel it across every inch of my skin. Missing home pounds in my throat and when I hear my mother, my uncle, my little cousins saying the words back to me, all our voices are tied up in our own resolution. If roadmaps could fall off the pages, they’d straighten into chains and knot our vocal chords until we were strained, breaking voices and miles, miles, miles to go.

 This year, it’s something else entirely. I don’t feel regret or need in my tone, just the quiet of winter in the city, a bareness to my voice that’s missing in the evergreen trees that line my neighborhood streets. For the remainder of our record-breaking short conversation, I can hear one family member’s voice (indistinguishable, I don’t have a face to assign to the tenor of their voice anymore) searching through mine, pulling at the strings, trying to play an apology out of me, but this year I am rusty and out of tune, and when the melody is too dull to listen to, we hang up, and my Christmas obligations are over before the day has scarcely begun. 

 There’s a small pile of letters and gifts on the half wall that separates my kitchen from the living room, but they’re all untouched. I’ve been gathering them there for a month, since the first arrived at the end of November, the only sealed Christmas card I’d receive. I didn’t risk a single paper cut, instead let the pile grow slowly until I could count fourteen well wishers and friends who had not yet given up on getting a response, a thank you card, the smallest indication of warmth to return in their direction. 

 I hated obligatory thank you’s more than I hated phone calls, because there was something about that manufactured future that greeting cards demand that I just couldn’t stand, so that was a task I never carried through on. 

 I had the whole day to myself, and on the phone with my sister this morning, she’d suggested I take myself to a bar, try and meet someone equally as lost as myself on this most desperate and depressing of holidays when one’s family are so personally estranged. I knew her motives were deeper than simple companionship, that she was still fighting against the resignation of your appearance, but I knew she knew I wasn’t going to follow through. She could still be hopeful, but I didn’t have to be.

I knew if I looked for you, I would find you. 

I would find you, and no one else. 

Christmas night hits like a hangover, though for the first holiday in years, I’ve been practically sober all day. I could claw the sleep from my eyes, drown myself out with coffee, but instead I smother my aching chest with my sweatshirt, draw the hood, and brave the outdoors. 

I don’t quite know what brought me here, but my street, for once, is quiet. In a predominately industrial neighborhood, closed storefronts lie without their usual bustle and noise. The silence is annoying, and the pattering of absolute momentum, spring masquerading as winter. The sky is a curtain drawn and I have my hands pressed to the window, pushing my way out into the stillness of air and air is pushing me back into my house but I’ve always been pretty good at resistance of any kind. 

There’s a bar down the street, one that claims it belongs in the bay area, and often I’d pass and wonder what the hell it thought it was doing this far south if it’s loyalties obviously lay elsewhere, but I guess that was kind of the point of this city, people either believing they come come here to melt and still carry every bit of them and their whole hometown with them as they walked through life is geological denial, or people who abandoned all identity and thought they could build themselves from the ground up, that Los Angeles had them anything to offer in personal reconstruction. I can tell you firsthand that there is nothing to make a person out of besides other people, and there are enough tombstones already in this city; we don’t need more scattered body parts to bury.

So I walk to the bar, because I’m pressing hard against my closet door, keeping my skeletons in, keeping the hinges from straining against the present and the future with the weight of the past. Nobody told me that time would dig it’s nails in and follow you wherever you went, show up when you least expected it, and that’s why Christmas night hit like a hangover, because everywhere I walked I found you. I found you in the cracks on the sidewalk and the eyes of a stranger, the pattern on a tie that didn’t look anything like the ties he wore, but it shared the same colors. I walked into the San Francisco Saloon and tuned out the Raiders game with every intention of staying long enough to tell my sister I’d put in effort today.

She knew about most of the skeletons, but I don’t think she could understand their heaviness, not even if I found a thousand different ways to explain it. 

A girl with a full, toothy smile sits next to me, brave enough to puncture the coldness of my demeanor. I’ve been nursing the same glass of something for the entirety of my stay and I’ve barely broken the halfway point. It’s a formality more than anything else. I don’t drink except for special occasions, and Christmas should be a special occasion, but it’s not. In fact, I’m so unapologetically unenthused with the season this year that I wonder if my mom was always secretly Jewish and never told me, or if a Christmas tree fell on me when I was little, something I could not know about or block out to explain my disconnect with the holiday cheer everyone else was feeling.

The girl who sat has earrings that sway in the shape of jingle bells with the quiet sound to boot. It rings along the corners of my recognition like a dog whistle, or the mosquito sound I haven’t been able to hear since I was a teenager, and I don’t know if her presence filling my company or the sound disturbing my peace and quiet, blistering through the low music of the bar, but when I turn to her, my mouth is a straight line, thin and unforgiving. She is all soft and I am sharp to the core, and my attitude is shaped like a dagger pointing straight at her, so it’s a wonder she doesn’t flinch when I turn to acknowledge she’s there. 

My body and mind are two warring forces. My body tried to drag me back to my apartment, woke pressure between my shoulder blades as if that would help me fly, or say no, it isn’t safe here, go back, David, go back. But my mind has always been the driving force behind me, the devil on my shoulder with his claws that dig and his darkness that conceals. I don’t even think I have a righteous conscious anymore. You were my conscious, and when the girl with the singing jewelry sits beside me, I can see you like a photograph. The eyes crinkle in the same way, confidence that pierces, sweater that sags, it doesn’t matter if the hair and the skin is different because your hair and your skin are different too, and every time I see you, I see you in a stranger. Every piece of you belongs to someone else now, and I wonder if that means I belong to strangers too. 

I think it might be worse to think I’m wholly my own. 

“Are you from around here?” She speaks the words in a way that tells me she’s from somewhere else; city natives have no pride and those who adopt the town are always trying to prove they belong here. I’m not from here, but I’ve been here long enough to stop trying, so I nod my head anyway.

“Santa Monica. You?” The question tacks itself onto my word like a continuation, but she answers without a beat.

“Yeah. Well, Orange County, but it’s basically the same thing.”

I hate people who think Orange County and Los Angeles are the same thing. You would have hated her too. You would have agreed with me. It happens suddenly, how the sun sets and it feels late and I feel tired and she doesn’t look like you anymore.

I’m distracted by the smell of smoke. It tinges the air like firewood, but it wafts in from a cigarette instead. All the same, it smells like winter, and I do feel cold. There are cold hands wrapping themselves around me, finger by finger, palm by palm, and I clear my throat subtly enough that nobody hears me. 

There’s no reason to stay here. I mumble my apology, pay for the drink I haven’t touched and push the stool away and leave the girl and her sweater and her smile to their own devices, and I’m going home. It’s December, and I’ll regret it from now until the New Year, but I make my resolutions early. 

I belong to nobody. 

When Rose calls that night, she asks how I spent Christmas, and I tell her the characters, not the story. She listens to my descriptions, waits quietly as I tell her about the person I saw in the cracks in the sidewalk, the person in the quiet, noiseless air, the tie worn by a stranger, what I saw in a sky that refused way to clouds and stormy weather and doesn’t say a word. From the way I speak, I could be myself again, seeing people, considering people, not just constructing different versions of you out of body parts, but Rose knows about the skeletons, and I know she doesn’t see through me, but for tonight, for just one night, she helps me hold the closet doors shut. My voice, the buzz on her end of the receiver, together we’re a lock. 

* * *

 I go to a work party on New Years Eve. It’s one of those big fancy deals with sponsors all about schmoozing and cozying up to the next big thing in art, but I stand to the corner of the rented space in the optimal position between the buffet and the open bar and pretend to be doing something very important on my phone. Everyone’s cool with people using technology at these things because most people are young, any where from fresh out of college to my age. A few are older, because they’re wizened old design geniuses or something, but I don’t really buy it. I’m uppity about art in the way that I hate anyone that thinks they’re superior for being uppity about art. 

I’m like a reverse hipster.

Except now I am so close to finally kicking ass at 2048. I told myselfI’d delete this damn game off my phone if I didn’t finish it by 2014, but I don’t know if I’m going to be able to bring myself to end it without at least getting past that famed checkpoint. I’ve worked it for weeks, tried every strategy, played to every side and corner, stacked and sacrificed and have come so close so many damn times, but it just never pans out the way I want it to. Maybe thats why I’m so damn competitive. I never actually win at anything. 

My parents thought it was a good idea to sign me up for AYSO soccer when I was little, because I was quiet and pessimistic and “didn’t play well with others” and so throwing me in the mix with 10 aggressive 9 year olds who’d been playing since they were 4 years old was clearly the best solution for a small scrawny kid like me. They ended up making me play goalie, which they realized was a bad idea not after my repeated protests, but after we finished second to last in the city-wide U10 division. I didn’t bother with sports again after that 

You said sports built character, but never played a game in your life. You liked to watch, though, sit on the sidelines and steal orange slices at half time. I’d help you with your fruit thievery, and we were partners in crime then, and not for the last time either. But if nothing else, it was harmless, as it so rarely would be again.  

But I don’t see gunshots as I stare at my phone. I don’t see anything except the monochromatic blocks and the slight outline of my own reflection on the screen, all concentration and furrowed brow. 2. 4. It starts slow, and it builds and builds as I direct and five minutes later I’m close, I’m sweating a little, enough for my jacket to feel uncomfortable and my sunglasses to slide down the tip of my nose. The outside venue whistles with nighttime air and cools me down but this is my only reprieve; like moths to the light of my retina display, I’m not alone with my distractions for long. 

Multiple things happen at once. The first thing that happens is my phone freezes. I stare at it, how it refuses to swipe, refuses to anything. This is why I don’t win. and I am certain in this moment that this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. 

“Shit. Shit shit shit. Shit.” I mutter under my breath and bang my phone against my palm, once and then again, and then four times in rapid succession. As expensive as my iPhone was at the time of purchase, it really is a piece of shit these days. Im vehemently refused to buy a new one until this one refuses to work anymore, but three years of use has it near it’s breaking point. The screen goes dark and I click the lock button, and then the home button multiple times to no response. A few seconds later it lights up and goes dark again, and out of what I perceive as spite, decides to interpret my repeated pressings of buttons as an indication that I would like three screenshots of my lock screen. Huffing angrily, I return the brick to its resting place in my jacket pocket. 

I don’t reason until I look up and rejoin the party that a stranger has been watching me from the bar, a few feet away. He doesn’t say anything, or seem embarrassed when I catch him staring. He doesn’t even look away. Instead, his lips continue to twist in a sort of amused expression, and I can tell immediately that he’s the type to laugh at the misfortune of others, especially if they’re young adults going prematurely gray and seem to be struggling with the twenty-first century. 

I’m telling you, John, you two would have gotten along so well. 

My expression should say “What are you looking at, punk?” in a way that metaphorically straightens the lapels of my jacket and winds my arm around the twig waist of a supermodel or something, but instead it kind of just reads as “Oh god, you didn’t see that, please don’t tell anyone,” in the really kind of pathetic way that seems to only accompany, well, me. He leans forward a little to make his voice clear above the music. 

“Did you try turning it off and on?” 

I cross to the bar, my eyes squinting behind my sunglasses. “Haha. You’re a real comedian.”

 “I do it for the free bottles of water. Not to mention, there’s just something about a stool on a blank stage that says ‘I’m still paying off forty thousand dollars of student loans, we can’t afford a backdrop.’ I’m all about transparency.”

“Yeah, you’re practically see-through.”

I could have said something more clever. He had this whole running joke going, opening up a world of possibility for quips and quick remarks, but I don’t regret it either, because the point is I _had_ something more clever to say, but I just decided not to say it. I always have something more clever to say, something more sarcastic or more bitter or rude or off-color. I used to be the kind of person to say shit just to test the waters, to see what would play well with certain crowds and what wouldn’t. I was brave, when I was younger. These days I play it safe. Maybe the things I think about saying don’t even sound funny to me anymore. 

I take the lull in our witty banter to realize I haven’t even looked at him yet. His hair is dark and a long kind of short and curly that sticks up in four different places. It’s the foil to mine, which is platinum blonde by some ungodly strike of nature and lies flat down on my forehead with no inclination to lift or budge. I used to spike it up in middle school, but Rose said that I looked like a Backstreet Boy, so I stopped. I would not have my name tarnished by the aesthetic of a 90’s boy band, not at the impressionable young age of thirteen. Goddammit, I was Dave Strider. 

This guy, whoever he was though, he seemed familiar. Not familiar in the way that everyone seems to me, where I see bits and pieces of you in things that they do, words they say, body parts and crevices and wounds, but in the same way you can smell something and have rush of memory come back to. You’ll catch a scent and you’re back in your childhood, sitting on the bathroom floor of your old house, or in your desk in the fifth grade. He seemed too familiar, as if he’d been cut straight out of my memory and placed in a different background. He was so painfully _familiar_ that it didn’t occur to me. And I swear to god, John, I swear I hate myself for not recognizing you right then.

“I’m John, by the way. Egbert. Speaking of transparency, I’m actually someone’s plus one so I don’t know anything about Bay and Design, but you look like you probably work there.”

Dumbstruck. I think that’s a word it. I’m glad that pulses are only audible in works of fiction and not in real life, because you would have stared if you could hear the way my heart picked up then. I swear something like adrenaline was released because I felt suddenly like I could run a fucking marathon, like if my body would let me I would get up and run all twenty-seven miles in the other damn direction, but instead my eyes widen slightly and I see you. I see you skin, warm even in the night, and I see your hair, messy where mine is tame, I see every piece of you that I’ve missed and mourned and burned and forgotten over the past two years.

You’re back. You’re alive. 

With a clammy hand, I shake yours. 

 “Dave Strider. I do. It’s nice to meet you.” 

 Our conversation doesn’t last. I doubt I even make an impact on you, except for the smile you give me when you leave, but it’s such a passing gesture I don’t bother to acknowledge it. In fact I don’t smile at all, I stand at the bar with my knuckles whitening around a beer bottle and let you leave. I don’t have your number, I don’t have a single way of finding you, but if history repeats itself (and I have it on good conscience  that it does) then I won’t need it. You’ll find me. 

I haven’t had that much to drink, but already my mind is a tide. The moon sits straight up above when midnight tolls and brings in the new year, and my thoughts are rising and falling in snow peaks and deep ravines. My life is all about pacing, about practice and rhythm and schedule, and I know that I’m supposed to be excited for the new year, but I can’t feel past the end of 2013. I can’t see ahead, I’m completely numb to the coming months.

It takes three miles to walk home, but I do.

** Text Message to: Rose Lalonde: Sent 2:46AM, 1/1/14** 

he’s back

** Text Message from: Rose Lalonde: Received 2:48, 1/1/14**

Shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took me way longer to write than I wanted it to, but I have a little structure for where I want to go with this now! Bases for stories are always important. The next chapter will be a flashback and will hopefully clear up one of those ambiguous memories Dave keeps referencing in the second person. 
> 
> Please comment with your opinions, especially if you like it because it SERIOUSLY motivates me to write me. But also all critique is welcome! 
> 
> Have a lovely while, everyone.  
> Carly


	3. A Good Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (August 2005)
> 
> This sorta-flashback includes a window, vodka, and some very ambiguous intentions. 
> 
> I honestly can't remember what song I wrote this to, or why I waited a month to post this when it's been done since late October, but oh well.

_ August 15, 2005_

There is nothing comfortable about the back of a police car. My hands are chapped and raw on the palms, rung with red around the wrists, and only one of my symptoms is the fault of the handcuffs pinning my arms uncomfortably behind my back. As new as I am to adulthood, I can already feel my limbs beginning to creak and whine, rusted with my eighteen years, not as flexible as I once was, or ever was. Once I sprained my groin trying to emulate the girls in my grade, cheerleaders who could kick their legs above their heads as though they were not fucking contortionist freaks of nature and I swore never again. The incident in question barred me from any varied sort of athletics in the future, which in my opinion includes putting my hands uncomfortably behind my back, straining my shoulders and probably fucking up my ribs or something. I don’t know how my skeleton works, but I do know that it’s not something I really want to fuck with, and sitting here, pissed off in the back of a police car, I feel pretty fucked with. 

At the high prime of my adolescence, I’m anti-anything and everything. I’m against police and government, admittedly without knowing a single rudimentary thing about how either works. I’m old enough to have voted in the 2004 elections, but a year and a half ago I went around election month telling anyone and everyone who would listen that I would not have voted even if I was of age. Now, scene set police cruiser interior, my farmer’s sunburn cooling gratefully in the shade, and I could at least say I’d been consistent over the months since  my eighteenth birthday. Anti-education as well, senior year was spent sleeping though my mandatory government class, failing every quiz that rolled around, and somehow scraping by with a barely passing grade reliant entirely on extra credit and incredible persistence. Part of my anti-education tendencies demanded me to be pro-graduation, so I worked with my resources and walked across that stage in June to everyone’s surprise and, from what I could tell, relief. 

Persistent. Resourceful. Dedicated. Driven. That’s what every counselor and teacher wore about me in letters of recommendation sent away to colleges I would never attend. I wonder if they saw me more in a light like this when they wrote those things, imagined my mugshot as they flipped through the yearbook to find my picture, trying to put a face to the boy who’d requested their opinions on character. To me, those words seemed like thinly veiled synonyms for annoying, incorrigible, trouble, time-bomb, but maybe that’s just what I tell myself from behind the plexiglass divider that separates myself from the officers who’d pushed me roughly into this vehicle that smells like sweat, cigarettes, and urine. The motherfucking trifecta, honestly. 

My pessimism lasts about as long as it takes them to read you your Miranda rights and shove you into the seat next to me. Cuffed as ever, you grin the grin I’ve learned by heart, memorized so I can see it behind my eyelids when I blink. If you ever got your teeth knocked out, I bet I could put your mouth back together with my eyes closed. 

Everything is a game to you. Everything is always a prank. You haven’t shaved in days, and I can see the beginnings of a beard sprouting up in tendrils around your chin, strewn across your cheeks, where I’m still smooth and soft, cursed by some hormonal deficiency I never got medically assessed, or ever really cared about to begin with. I understood the pressures of masculinity or whatever, but I didn’t have the sort of asshole personality that exemplified the adolescent male to begin with. Rather, I had the asshole personality that exemplified a cynic from too early an age, worry lines by my twenties, graying by my thirties, aging where you seemed to stay so eternally young. 

I knew the beginnings of our story, but not as strongly as I would accept them when tugged from the comfort of high school, of parents and home and the monotony of daily life that accompanies growing up. I’d not yet experienced the deja vu of seeing you in all your exactitudes in a bar, on a street corner, at a work party like I’d imagined you’d look if you got the chance to grow up. I knew from this point, but some of the memories I’d come to ponder over later were still buried deep at eighteen, repressed and socialized out of cognition. In fact, the only other death of yours I could remember at this point was a funeral I never attended, and you wore a different face back then, a different name, a different hue of skin and a different shade of time. Still, you were always the same personality, always you. 

How you sit next to me here is how I know you best. Wide, toothy grin and restless eyes, a sort of manic fire behind them that says we never have to rest, we never have to stop, as long as we have gas and cash we can do whatever, say whatever, be whoever, and I believe you. You’re braver than me, more brazen than me, more tightly sewn together. Your seams are never loose, never frayed, and you can keep your calm better than anyone I’d ever met. You’re like a strong wind, pushing me around as you please, and I am always a hot day, welcoming the breeze with open arms. 

“How much do you bet I can get these handcuffs off?” 

“A million bucks. Show me what you’ve got, Houdini.” 

For a moment, you struggle against the restraints, and then give up with a noncommittal shrug. “I loosened them a little. I’ve gotta save my big break for the cameras.”

I laugh quietly, but it fades as quickly as the cops open their respective doors and tell us to shut up, though we’ve already stopped talking. We might be the little shits we are, but we know when to call it quits, so I sit next to you and you sit next to me and we exercise our right to remain silent. We don’t even have to look at each other. We sit and we smirk out our darkened windows, and it’s the sort of tinting that would make the whole inside of the car cast with a sickly shade of purple if not for the brightness filtering in through the windshield. All the same, it reminds me of the dark, like if I closed my eyes and turned my head to the side, I could pretend I’m sitting in the dark where I’ll recognize you and you’ll recognize me and we rename this bad day a good night. 

I mentioned it to you years later, and you looked like you almost remembered, but not quite. I recounted our experiences in whatever way seemed like it made the most sense at the moment. I sat in a taxi cab with you, same darkened windows that threw a temporary night time over us and I rubbed my wrists where there were once handcuffs. When I looked over at you, I saw you doing the same, sitting the same, your glance cast out the window in the same way I remember you at eighteen with your hands behind your back like mine, but when I asked you about it later, you told me you were cold, and I didn’t question it. 

I couldn’t tell you things explicitly. No one’s closet door were shut more tightly than yours, and it’s a room I don’t have the key to, despite the fact that I was there for it all, that I know the stories just as well as you know them poorly and incompletely. I was the one constant, and I was not allowed to tell you what I know. 

 It was frustrating, to see you everywhere, to know you so well, and have to start from scratch every time I met you. I tried to avoid you, recognized the dysfunction of the two of us and did everything I could to evade what brought you back to me, to scratch you out from my psyche and start fresh, but you were in every shop window, on every continent. My therapist had your eyes. My pharmacist, your teeth. My ex-girlfriend had the same shade of skin, the same softness, so when her back was to mine and my arms were around her, it wasn’t fair but I could pretend I was holding you instead of her. The second time your name slipped out of my lips instead of hers was the last time she left me without even a semblance of you. 

 How you sit next to me here is how I know you best. When I turn my head, I see your knees, knocking silently as you fidget in your seat uncomfortably. The restraints are getting to you, unwavering as your smile might be. I realize as we drive that I have no idea where the police station is. I think there might be signs off the highway that point the curious in that direction, but I’m not sure if a Crime Investigation Site is the same thing as a police station, and I really don’t care. I’m anti-both of those things, I think. 

 I redeem my phone call as immediately as I can while you sit and wait behind me for your chance at the wall phone. I dial Rose’s number and look at you as the line rings, your confidence faltering in solitude. I know you composure isn’t everything you've convinced yourself it is. I can remember last night, the Good Night, and I know if you lets yourself, you will crumble. Sheltered and repressed as I am now, I have a primal urge to glue you back together, to make sure your seams are really as tightly stitched as you claim they are. It’s scary, because know it doesn’t matter how well you holds yourself together. If the wrong person tugs on the wrong string, anyone can be unravelled. I don’t blame you for being cagey. 

Rose interrupts my thoughts with a different tone of voice than I expected. Rather than the shrill pitch I brace myself for, she sounds bored, but echoey, and I know that she’s put me on speaker phone in her room, inevitably pacing, inevitably wringing her hands. I know her well. 

“Please, please tell me that you did not murder anyone. Or commit arson. Wait, did you commit arson? Was it awesome?”

“You know there’s a time limit to these things, right?”

“Right, sorry.”

While ever my twin, my sister is the eighteen year old force of nature I never would be. She is refined and filed where I am jagged and unpolished. I have more grit and courage, but she is clever and never takes chances where she knows they are not necessary. All the same, I can hear her feeling around for her car keys on the other side of the receiver without being asked. 

I don’t exactly want to tell her what I’ve been up to today. It’s the sort of thing, nonjudgemental as she’s always been of me, that she would not approve of. “Non-profit Organizations do good things,” she’d say, and “Hurt the corporations that deserve to be hurt, not the ones that help others,” and a thousand other mantas I’d probably agree with in retrospect, except that I am eighteen and anti-charity, anti-decisions that are not mine to make. A smarter, older me would be the first to assure anyone who asked that at this point, I am not a good person yet. 

I tell her my bail. There’s quiet on the other end of line as I direct her to the cheap safe beneath my bed that probably wouldn’t stand up to being thrown on the sidewalk a couple times, but does the trick for eluding the impatient thief. Rose is patient as I read the combination, and gathers the money I’ve saved in case of emergencies.  

“Bail for two, huh.” She says the words like a waitress, noting a coffee order.

“Yeah,” I toss a backwards glance at you, one of your hands still noosing around the other, making suffocated flesh out of shaking hands. You’re looking at me, or maybe at the phone, waiting your turn with an impatient tap of your foot. I smile vaguely, more of a twitch of the lips to show I’m almost done. I finish quickly, leaving Rose to drive and rescue the two of us, and you step towards the receiver to call your dad. I leave the room; this isn’t my conversation to overhear.

That night, we sit in my bedroom quietly, my shoulders hunched over my phone, spine bent away from you, from questions. You won’t ask them, or answer them, but I don’t want to feel obligated to ask you anyway, so I let your rub your wrists, I think, and keep your back to me as well, I think, and the night grows darker. 

That night, I lie back on my comforter with my hands behind my head and you use my phone to check your Facebook, check the news, check for stories about two fucked up teenagers stealing all the office supplies from a non-profit organization so they can’t do any organizational things for no profit whatsoever. I pull my arms back and rub my forearms, sore from carting reels of paper from one location to another. The night grows darker. 

That morning, we pass a blue glass bottle of dragon fruit flavored vodka back and forth and back and forth. I think it smells like Starburst and you think it tastes like acid, and you drink it anyway. We share in each other’s poison and forget the reasons we had for the day, every joke you made and silence I let linger and the past fades to the present, the present fades to the eventual future but the morning too, in retrospect, does grows darker. 

On the good night I can’t help but remember, we sat in a different car in darkness not unlike a starless night, except there were stars, just blocked out by the roof of the car we sat in. You stretched your hand out, rested it on the closed compartment between the two front seats. Nothing breathed, nothing moved, nothing tried to care beyond it’s capacity, because on that good night empathy was a little difficult to manage and we didn’t want to, or think we were obligated to try. But I take your hand because mine are cold, and I know that cold and empty are not always synonymous, so although your hands are not any warmer than mine, there’s something comforting in feeling fuller. 

We empty the dark together. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That didn't really clarify anything, but I promise it's only because this world is so completely complex and mapping it out takes time. I'll try not to leave any loose ends, but if there's anything intriguing you want to make sure I explain, comment and I'll make sure to add it into a chapter! 
> 
> Those of you who have commented really remind and encourage me to keep working on this, and truly help to make it something I enjoy, so thank you very much! I hope you continue to dig this! 
> 
> Next chapter will be longer, and probably a bit of a wait. I expect to churn it out around Christmas, but that's a total guess. 
> 
> Carly


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